History of the United States II / Unit 18 USH2 2561 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Permanent Settlement
The idea
The Second New Deal made the federal role permanent. The Social Security Act of nineteen thirty-five, entry 1538, created old-age pensions and unemployment insurance; the Wagner Act, entry 1540, guaranteed the right to organise; the Fair Labor Standards Act of nineteen thirty-eight, entry 1545, created the minimum wage and the forty-hour week. Entry 1559 records the anchor's judgement that the laws of nineteen thirty-five still define the country today.
In practice
Pensions, a union's right to bargain, and a minimum wage, all written into federal law within four years.
Where people slip
The measure of the change is in entry 1558: before the First World War, in the Yawp's phrase, a government out of sight; after the New Deal, a potential ally. Digital History calls that shift in philosophy the New Deal's greatest legacy. The settlement was incomplete, as entry 1560 shows: it drew the edges of federal security around occupations and regions that left many Black Americans and women outside.
Your place on the trail
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